My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.2.26), identifying my support for the new Your Party project towards a mass socialist party in the UK. The need should be obvious – the far-Right are demolishing all notions of social justice, multiculturalism and anti-racism, women’s liberation and Trans-rights, health support including for mental distress, comprehensive education for all, accessibility and democracy. But the new Socialist Party is, probably necessarily, being borne out of strife and power-plays because that is what politics is. We’re voting for our first leadership, necessarily taking sides between between conservative and radical socialism. Following print deadlines and publication, Rob Rooney, a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Party and seasoned militant trade unionist, was debarred from his candidacy and expelled from Your Party despite being on the ballot papers. It is a signal that the election is indeed a battle, not some gentle guide towards consensus, just as have been all elections before. Without socialism to vote for, the working class will be conned and enticed by far-right lies suggesting they, at least the white working class, will be better off with an authoritarian and discriminatory government of exclusion, racism and misogyny. We cannot let that happen.

The unedited version here, or stretch the picture below to read the published article.

New Political Party will give Power to the People (the Herald editor’s rather cynical headline)

“Starmer’s Toast!” 2026 will see the fifth UK Prime Minister installed in the last five years. Who cares? They’re all the same – one elite political class all in it for themselves. This tiny cabal appear to rumble inside their own sealed bubble, most of us innocent victims of their intrigues and power plays.

Our collective cynicism, if not outright despair, is palpable. In the face of political convulsions and continued enforced austerity, and amid the continuing erosion of all facets of democracy, it can appear that universal suffrage is of the lowest priority for hard-pressed working class people.

And yet there are elections happening this week. Indeed, in trade union circles we have democratic all-member votes on various issues most weeks, from strike ballots to the election of a new General Secretary or a fresh union steward in our local workplace. 

The importance of political agency for the masses, for the working class, has been a cornerstone of trade union and socialist organisation for hundreds of years. The Labour Party was formed out of the trade union bureaucracy responding to the demand for working class representation in Parliament but intentionally and woefully separating the economic from the political struggles, stamping down on extra-parliamentary activity and political strikes in particular.

Labour has failed as a direct consequence. Today’s overwhelming disengagement of working class voters, borne of repeated disappointment, is dangerous. We could soon lose what few rights and powers we still enjoy.

The elections that opened yesterday are for the Central Executive Committee of “Your Party” – the latest parliamentary formation stepping onto the UK political stage. The mass media began and continues to deride and slur the Party, referring to it only as “Corbyn’s Lot” and denigrating the contest as in-fighting between “loony lefties”. Don’t get fooled again.

Elections are contests. People stand representing different strategies and tactics towards different goals. Of course that requires rigorous arguments and taking sides. Before Your Party is dismissed due to in-fighting, just consider the all but constant warfare at the heart of the Labour lot, Badenoch’s sinking Tory ship, and Farage’s chaotic ReformUK. Truth be told, there’s ideological strife inside Polanski’s squeaky clean Greens too! It’s politics! In any case, none of them are socialist organisations.

Your Party, when announced, gathered 800,000 people interested in the formation of a new socialist party in Britain. The launch Conference in Liverpool last November voted for an outright socialist constitution for workers’ rights and the redistribution of wealth from the billionaires back to the People. 

Tens of thousands of activists are engaged in meetings, debates and organisation for this new socialist party, in essence echoing the Webb’s 1918 Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution:  “for the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange…to secure for workers the full fruits of their industry and promote equitable distribution”.

But these are not the nineteen hundreds. Your Party cannot and must not try to be a Labour Party Mark2. That formation failed the working class – tried and tested over a hundred years and more, cutting the welfare state and restricting workers wages all in pursuit of supporting and maintaining the capitalist system.

We have to should focus on socialist demands including:

1 End the cost of living crisis, end austerity policies and tackle obscene levels of inequality;

2 Welfare not warfare, invest in public services, no to privatisation, kick the market out of  service delivery;

3 Initiate an urgent council house building programme;

4 Renationalise water, energy and all public utilities without compensation;

5 For peace and against war. For the liberation of Palestine, against imperialist assaults in  Venezuela, Greenland and the Middle East;

6 Against all forms of oppression, and specifically including trans-Rights;

7 For the abolition of anti-trade union legislation;

8 For action on the climate crisis including the end of fossil-fuels, to invest in jobs and protect  our environment;

9 Defend civil liberties and the right to protest, against Starmer’s authoritarianism.

We face far more global turmoil than did our ancestors of the turbulent twenties and war-preparations of the 1930s. The economic, political and moral corruption of big corporations and their billionaire owners is greater than ever. The militarisation, rearmament and drive to greater war is fast-tracking. Most of all, the collapse of climate stability – accelerating extreme weather events destroying the fundamentals of food security – demands there can be no more “business as usual”.

In response to the obvious crisis we are living in, current parliamentary politics is dominated by the fast-tracked drive of far-right, nationalist and fascist organisation here and across the world.

Your Party will emerge from its first election period dead-at-birth if it tries to mirror the old parties of a bygone era. A pointless waste of focussed enthusiasm and finite energy. This has to be an activist party, an organisation of organisers, an insurgent mobilisation of working class power that can combat the billionaire corporations and the toxic, racist, misogynist, divisive far-Right.

This is not a project that can plan a thirty-year slow-build towards parliamentary power. There’s no time. This week’s elections have to produce a leadership that will represent and build collective working class power, immediately!

Tony Staunton